Tawa's blog - dedicated to Christian apologetics, the explanation and defence of the Christian faith.

Friday, January 20, 2017

Imaginative Apologetics, Part II - Situating Apologetics

Apologetics, Imagination, and Imaginative Apologetics

I’d like to continue sharing
some thoughts from a review article I wrote for Trinity Journal,[1]
a lengthy interaction with Imaginative
Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition, edited by
Andrew Davison.[2]
In my previous blog post, I sought to articulate some of the biblical mandate
for apologetics. In this post, we want
to look at just a few historical and contemporary apologetic trends.

In subsequent
posts, we’ll look at the place of imagination in Christian scholarship and
apologetics, focusing especially on Jamie Smith’s recent contributions. Down
the road, I will interact with the various articles in Imaginative Apologetics.

Situating Apologetics:
Historical Apologetics

Scripture commands
all believers to “always be prepared to give
an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that
you have.”[3] I
suggest that a concise but descriptive definition of apologetics might be “the
defense and explanation of the truth of the Christian faith.”[4]

The practice of
apologetics, as the defense and explanation of Christianity’s truthfulness, has
always had a central place in the Church. In Imaginative
Apologetics, Craig Hovey notes that numerous early church fathers wrote
to counter misunderstandings of the fledgling faith, responding especially to
charges of atheism, cannibalism, and civic disloyalty.[5]
Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Minucius Felix are cited by N. T.
Wright as the pre-eminent early apologists.[6]
Justin Martyr, a Greek philosopher and teacher, wrote the first Christian
treatise on the resurrection, along with his two major apologies (First Apology and Second Apology) and
the apologetic Dialogue
with Trypho the Jew. Justin exemplifies an apologetic approach that not
only “saw . . . the need to rebut charges of immorality, sedition and indeed
atheism,” but also sought to “argue that Christianity was actually the truth
which made sense of the glimmers of light within paganism.”[7]
From the early church apologists, to the giant Christian philosopher Augustine
of Hippo, to medieval philosophers and apologists like Boethius and Anselm of
Canterbury, to early modern apologists like Abelard and Pascal, to late modern
apologists Joseph Butler, William Paley, and Soren Kierkegaard, apologetic
ministry has always had a place within the Church and the Christian academy.
New challenges to Christianity have arisen throughout eras—Islam, deism,
naturalism, atheism, postmodernism, relativism—but Christian thinkers have
always risen to the task of providing an informed and passionate response.

The past four
decades have seen a marked rise in apologetic enterprise. Earlier works by
Cornelius Van Til, E. J. Carnell, John Warwick Montgomery, and Francis
Schaeffer strongly influenced a new generation of Christian philosophers and apologists.[8]
Lee Strobel’s popular lay-oriented apologetic works both sparked and marked a
rise in apologetic interest in North American Christianity.[9]
Over the past decade, Christian high schools, colleges, universities, and
seminaries have responded by offering a larger number of courses in
philosophical and biblical apologetics.[10]
Accordingly, Christian scholars have produced more intentionally apologetic
treatises in science,[11]
philosophy,[12] history,[13]
biblical studies,[14]
and worldview.[15] The past eight years in
particular have seen a flood of new academic works in apologetics on the
market.[16]
Simply put, Christian apologetics, as an interdisciplinary approach to
explaining and defending the Christian faith, has matured and achieved a
measure of influence in the broader academic and ecclesiastic community.

Having situated
contemporary apologetics, it is time next to turn our attention to imagination,
then to engage with Imaginative
Apologetics. Stay tuned!

[5]
“Theological training has put me in touch with the early Church’s efforts to
defend the faith against misunderstanding from their pagan neighbours.” Craig
Hovey, “Christian Ethics as Good News,” in Imaginative
Apologetics, 98.

[6]
N. T. Wright, The
Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of
God, Volume Three (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 500-10.

[11]
E.g., John Jefferson Davis, The
Frontiers of Science & Faith: Examining Questions from the Big Bang to the
End of the Universe (Downers Grove: IVP, 2002); Patrick Glynn, God—The Evidence: The
Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World (Roseville,
CA: Prima, 1997); Hugh Ross, The
Creator and the Cosmos (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2001); Francis S.
Collins, The Language
of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press,
2006); Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer, Science and Evidence for
Design in the Universe: The Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute
(San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000); William A. Dembski and Jonathan Wells, The Design of Life:
Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems (Dallas: The
Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 2008).